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Hardcore gamers, as a ‘demographic’, are supposed to incite the buying fever in other gamers through word of mouth, right? But that word of mouth isn’t goddamn magic. When I told my roommate to go grab the demo for Flower I had no idea there wasn’t a demo. So I said to him ‘Why don’t you grab the demo for Savage Moon, I heard it was good’. Again, no demo.

Now consume this bit of information slowly. The PS3 isn’t mine, it’s my roommate’s. I’m suggesting games on his machine; he hasn’t turned it on in about a year, except to play Shadow of the Colossus. If he can’t even try the downloadable content, what’s the point? Are the games on PSN so good that they can forego demos, or is this an issue with PSN being a free service? Or, more sinisterly, is there some secret Sony law that forbids timely demos?

Demos are big, they sell games. Sure you can give too much away (I played the Forza 2 demo for over a year) but you can also do more harm than good by denying people demos. Killzone 2 only offering a demo to those who pre-order shows they a) don’t trust the game enough or b) they want to make it look like a club for the cool kids, hoping people will break down and pre-order.

Maybe I’m spoiled by Microsoft’s rigidity requiring games to have demos. And if that’s so then it’s bad news for Sony, because the consumer is being spoiled by their competitor.